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I was born in Den Haag in 1948 and my mother wanted to call me Dinja as she saw an advertisement for a concert or perhaps a poetry reading by a woman called Dinja de Wolf, and my mother liked the name.

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When she tried to register the name, however, she was told that she could not call me that name as it was not on the list of "official" names. So she registered me as Diana, but I have always been called Dinja.

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We emigrated to Australia when I was 4 and now I live in New Zealand.
In 1948 the name was very unusual. Now there seem to be more Dinjas.
I had an Iranian dentist in Zeist in 1975 and he told me that the name meant "world" or "life" in his language.